How Does Laban Influence Modern Dance

Dance is a language, a way of communicating and knowing, through body movements by the use of time, space and force. Dance is the only language that visually allows the audience to feel and understand a situation. Dancers express themselves in different dance forms. In modern dance the dancer allows his/her emotions to express their feelings about a situation. In the 1900’s, modern dance began to develop as a rebellion against classical ballet, mainly in the United States, central Europe and Germany. How did Isadora Duncan and Rudolf Laban as the most influential modern dancers affect the development of modern dance? The main inventors of modern dance were Isadora Duncan in the United States and Rudolf Laban in Germany. Each had a common goal

He was as well one of the pioneers of modern dance in Europe. Laban was born on 1879 in Bratislava, Slovakia and died in 1958 in Weybridge, United Kingdom. During his life span it was a remarkable period of political and artistic history. At 1930 Rudolph von Laban became the director of movement in Berlin however he lived in Germany at the time of Nazis in 1933 therefore most of his books and notations were banned by the Nazis. Laban therefore traveled to Paris to study architecture however he got interested in performing arts. At this stage Laban watched Isadura Duncan’s performance of a Greek goddess dancing to the music of Beethoven symphony, without the use of ballet structures. She was able to express her emotions, “Although Laban considered Duncan a strong performer however he believed movement should arise from the inner rhythm of the dancer not from the music.”(The Maker Of Moder Dance In Germany 1:52- 2:00). Rudolf Laban had a great impact on dance by his unique techniques and invention of labanotation which was the use of complete and effective system for analyzing dance notation movements. Hid notation movements record every type of physical motion, from classical ballet to war and social dances. He as well had a great impact on dancers by writing 9 books. One of these 9 books written in 1950 “The mastery of movement” he presented three basic approaches to notion. “The first one consisted of the description of movement by sign, such as words, letters or numbers.” (John Hodgson Mastering Movement pg4) His first notation supposes knowledge of the movement on parts of the body. Laban said that Flow, Space, Time and Weight were the four movement factors. He referred to Flow as bound or free, which were both greatly used in Modern dance as it is free flowing. Space was direct which uses space moving from one place to another or indirect, which was